About this project

Did you know?

1. The postcode system in Germany has been unified after the Reunification (effective by 03/10/1990).
2. All postcodes are 5-digits long.
3. The 5-digits postcodes are geographically organised (from North to South).
4. The state borders do not always correspond with postal code areas.

The long story short

Scrap the website http://germany.postcode.info/ and collect all postcode information in a semicolon (';') separated file (./scraper/postcodes.de) for Germany. The results contains the following information:

• Municipality (Ort)
• 5-digits postcode (Plz)
• State (Lander)
• District (Kreise)
• GPS coordinates Latitude
• GPS coordinates Longitude

Example

Mommenheim;55278;Rheinland-Pfalz;Mainz-Bingen;49.8803;8.265

Business Perspectives

Link the data with interractive geo-maping:

• https://www.openstreetmap.org/
• https://geopandas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gallery/plotting_basemap_background.html
• https://towardsdatascience.com/easy-steps-to-plot-geographic-data-on-a-map-python-11217859a2db
• https://towardsdatascience.com/loading-data-from-openstreetmap-with-python-and-the-overpass-api-513882a27fd0

Quickstart - Setup

1. pip install -r requirements.txt
2. cd ./scraper
3. scraper crawl postcodes

Some statistics

• There are 16 Landers in Germany
• There are 8,132 different postcodes
• Some major cities does not have Kreise (Kreisefrei)
• There are around 11,000 municipalities in Germany
• The generated files contains 16,481 rows
• With scrapy, the scraper runs in 3 minutes instead of 9 hours

Ressources

• http://germany.postcode.info/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Germany
• https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9unification_allemande